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sidechannels.pub

sidechannels

Experimental writing at the edge of security research. Tracing assumptions, questioning what isn't mainstream.

Security

Exploit primitives, memory corruption, and kernel internals.

Interpretability

Mechanistic theory and circuit analysis of LLMs.

Verification

Formal methods and safety invariants in distributed systems.

2026
ESSAY

Severity Inflation as a Signaling Failure: A Researcher's Quality Gate

AI scales the cost of producing a vulnerability report toward zero faster than it scales the cost of producing a correctly-scoped one. Spence's signaling cost asymmetry collapses as a result. This post documents the inflation antipatterns, the six-check quality gate, and the AI-side adversarial enforcement structure one researcher built in response.

#vulnerability-disclosure#signaling-theory#ai-security#bug-bounty#quality-gate#severity-inflation#anthropic-mythos